Cal football players make slight improvement academically

Updated 11:22 pm, Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Cal's football team finished in last place - academically - in the Pac-12 Conference on Wednesday, when the NCAA released its annual ratings of student athletes' prowess off the field and in the classroom.

Even so, Cal officials said they were encouraged that the team's latest Academic Progress Rate (APR) score, a four-year average concluding in the 2012-13 academic year, is better the previous average: 938 vs. 935 on a 1,000-point scale.

And there was clearly relief all around that the team's latest score did not sink below 930, considered the minimum acceptable standard.

Cal men's basketball did not do much better - one point, in fact, at 939. That's 11th in the Pac-12 and reflects a decline from last year, falling from 955. The decline is attributed to a one-year score of 938 for 2012-13 replacing a perfect score of 1,000 from 2008-09.

"This is a process and it will take time for some of our lower-performing programs to turn it around," athletic director Sandy Barbour said in a statement.

Now a decade old, the Academic Progress Rate was created by the NCAA specifically to elevate academic performance among student-athletes, which in the case of revenue-generating football and men's basketball has traditionally lagged behind their performance on the playing fields and courts.

Each team is scored on a 1,000-point scale, with anything below 930 triggering a penalty that makes the team ineligible for postseason competition.

To arrive at a team's score, each student-athlete is worth two possible points: one for good grades - good enough to remain eligible for the team - and one for staying in school or graduating.

Points are lost if a player becomes ineligible or drops out. Bonus points can be earned if a player who left school returns and re-enrolls.

"Since we began collecting data for the APR, nearly 13,000 student-athletes have returned to campuses and earned an additional APR point for their former teams," Harrison said. "That's 13,000 lives changed for the better." He called it the NCAA's "greatest achievement."

Cal, in fact, has a program designed to encourage former athletes who left without their degrees to return to Berkeley and finish. Former football players Jahvid Best, J.J. Arrington and Tully Banta-Cain - who all had NFL careers of varying lengths - are back in school working on their degree requirements.

"Across the board we do not have student-athletes flunking out," Barbour said. "They're getting to the end of their athletic eligibility and just walking away. ... They don't graduate."

In fact, Cal's football and basketball teams posted the worst graduation rates among the nation's 72 major intercollegiate athletics programs last year, the NCAA reported last fall. The shocking news led Cal to create an academic task force for athletics to determine what steps are needed to improve the classroom performance of those teams.

But it's the current academic rankings that suggest what the graduation rates might be, and they appear to be inching upward.

Good-to-perfect describes the academic standing of the rest of Cal's 27 NCAA Division I sports teams. Four teams recorded perfect 1,000s for the most recent four-year period: men's and women's tennis, women's gymnastics and women's volleyball.

By way of contrast, Stanford is at the top of the list in the Pac-12 in both football (984) and men's basketball (1,000). Twelve Cardinal teams, in fact, recorded perfect 1,000s for the most recent APR period.

"When you see that many teams doing well across the board, you're pleased. We're obviously ecstatic," Stanford athletic director Bernard Muir said. "We're quite proud of our coaches and our athletes and all the other people who helped achieve this score."

The NCAA, governing body for most major college sports in the U.S., has two academic metrics it produces each year. The APR comes out in the spring and the Graduation Success Rate (GSR) is released in the fall. Last fall Cal football had the worst graduation rate in the country among major conferences at 44 percent.

Cal basketball was at 38 percent.

But the latest numbers are encouraging to John Cummins, a retired associate chancellor who co-authored a critical study last year of Cal's management of intercollegiate athletics.

Monitoring academic performance of athletes "is something you have to be constantly attentive to, and the graduation rate numbers have focused the attention of everyone involved to making sure those numbers improve," Cummins said. "It's extremely important to make sure that these players - in revenue sports in particular, where the real challenge is - get the best education possible."

The academic task force created to study this issue at Cal is expected to release its report in June.